The Middle Matters

Four in 10 organizations have slashed management layers, according to Korn Ferry’s report, Workforce 2025: Power Shifts. Likewise, a 2024 study by Live Data Technologies for Bloomberg News found that middle-manager job cuts represented almost one-third of white-collar layoffs.

Midlevel managers are often responsible for enforcing administrative processes and procedures—such as tracking budgets, conducting performance appraisals, and preparing project progress reports—within a company. When middle managers leave, their work doesn’t just disappear. Their essential tasks simply “cascade both downward to front-line workers and upward to executives, creating intense pressure points throughout the organization,” contends Tracy Lawrence, an executive coach and leadership consultant, in the Forbes article “Burnout By Design: How Cutting Middle Management Affects Company Culture.”

“As companies embrace organizational ‘efficiency’ through flattening hierarchies, it’s a fundamental restructuring of businesses’ operations that can create systematic vulnerabilities that put entire organizations at risk,” Lawrence writes.

Far-reaching consequences

Workforce 2025 notes that, without middle managers, senior executives inherit a mountain of day-to-day responsibilities in addition to their strategic workload. Nearly 72 percent of such leaders in the US said they feel stretched beyond their capabilities, compared to 47 percent of their global peers.

When that occurs, senior leadership must take responsibility for midlevel managers’ typical problems and concerns rather than focusing on crucial business decisions and growth plans for their organizations. Forty-three percent of executives with such issues doubted their ability to fulfill their responsibilities, Korn Ferry reports.

“When done well, eliminating levels can be part of a larger solution to reduce bureaucracy,” notes Workforce 2025. “But without appropriate guardrails, any short-term gain in efficiency could lead to long-term pain.”

Furthermore, “executives lose critical connective tissue between strategy and execution,” Lawrence says. “Without middle managers translating their vision and providing ground-level feedback, senior leaders often make decisions in an information vacuum while simultaneously becoming bogged down in operational details that previously didn’t reach their level.”

Direct neglect

Removing middle management forces individual contributors to self-manage, coordinate across departments, and translate executive directives on their own. Korn Ferry indicates that losing a management layer leads to a lack of communication and alignment across the business, creating confusion and dissatisfaction among rank-and-file employees.

Lawrence describes how middle managers often provide direct reports with crucial coaching, feedback, and professional development. “Their absence creates an environment where employees receive less support precisely when they need more guidance to handle expanded responsibilities,” she explains.

In the midst of a leadership void, one-third of Workforce 2025 respondents said the lack of management has left them feeling directionless. Such an environment affects productivity and increases turnover because limited promotion paths drive top talent to seek opportunities elsewhere.

If the trend continues, it could prove especially concerning for future talent development and leadership pipelines. Without intentional development from middle managers who understand both the operational and strategic elements of their businesses, organizations risk creating a significant leadership gap in the coming years.

Read more from Talent Development Leader.